Several dozen Cincinnati residents will participate in Saturday's “Reclaim the Dream” rally in Washington, D.C.

The rally was organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network after it was announced that conservative TV talk show host and self-described “rodeo clown” Glenn Beck was holding a demonstration on the mall in Washington, D.C., on the 47thanniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King's historic “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”

Maps detail veterans dating to the 1700s

Newly restored digital copies
of 73-year-old maps detailing where U.S military veterans are buried throughout
Hamilton County will be unveiled Wednesday.

The Hamilton County Recorder’s
Office recently received map books dating to 1939 that were thought to have
been destroyed. Created by the Works Progress Administration, the map books
register the burial location of every veteran in the county who had served dating
back to the Revolutionary War.

The maps list details about
area veterans who served in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the War
with Mexico, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and World War I.

Eventually, the records were
transferred to microfiche between the 1950s and ‘70s, and the map books were
given to a local resident. The filmed copies began degrading over time and are
of poor quality, causing problems for historians, genealogical researchers and
others who tried to use them.

A member of the Ohio Genealogical
Society ultimately acquired the original copies of the map books and presented
them to the Recorder’s Office in February. Since that time, the office has worked
to transfer the images to a digital format and enhance their quality. All of
the images now are available on the Recorder’s Office website.

County Recorder Wayne Coates will
unveil the newly restored records at 2 p.m. Wednesday. The event will be held
in Room 205 of the County Administration Building, located at 138 E. Court St.,
downtown.

With all the blather about banning or restricting the construction of mosques in the United States because of Islam's alleged connections to terrorism, now is a good time to examine exactly what the religion is and what its central tenets are.

City Council yesterday expressed support for a barebones
parking plan that would upgrade all meters to accept credit card
payments and increase enforcement around the city, which should boost
annual revenues. The plan does not increase rates or hours at meters, as
Mayor John Cranley originally called for. It also doesn’t allow people
to pay for parking meters through smartphones. The plan ultimately means
death for the parking privatization plan, which faced widespread
criticism after the previous city administration and council passed it
as a means to jumpstart new investments and help fix the city’s
operating budget and pension system.

Councilman Christopher Smitherman plans to pursue changes
to the city’s political structure to give more power to the mayor and
less to the city manager. Smitherman says the current system is broken
because it doesn’t clearly define the role of the mayor. Under
Smitherman’s system, the mayor would run the city and hire department
heads; the city manager, who currently runs the city and handles hiring,
would primarily preside over budget issues; and City Council would pass
legislation and act as a check to the mayor. Smitherman aims to put the
plan to voters this November.

The Cincinnati Art Museum maintains five political
cartoons from the famed Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel), but none are
currently on public display. The cartoons call back to the history before
World War II, when most of the world played ignorant to the horrors of
the Holocaust and Americans had yet to enter the war. Dr. Seuss loathed the villains on the world stage, and his cartoons promoted a
message of interventionism that would eventually lead him to join the
Army to help in the fight against the Axis powers. When he returned home, he would
write the famous stories and books he’s now so well known for.

Mayor Cranley and some council members appear reluctant to
accept a routine grant application that would allow the Cincinnati Health
Department to open two more clinics because of the potential effect the
clinics could have on the city’s budget. Cranley and other council
members also seem concerned that the Health Department played a role in
the recent closing of Neighborhood Health Care, which shut down four
clinics and three school-based programs after it lost federal funding.

Ohio legislators approved a bill that forces absentee
voters to submit more information and reduces the amount of time
provisional voters have to confirm their identities from 10 days to one
week. For Democrats, the bill adds to previous concerns that Republicans
are attempting to suppress voters. The bill now goes to Gov. John
Kasich, a Republican who’s expected to sign the measure into law.

Today is Veterans Day, which began as Armistice Day on Nov. 11, 1919, the one-year anniversary of the end of World War I. President Eisenhower formally made it Veterans Day in 1954.

HBO airs a new documentary film tonight, Wartorn: 1861-2010, focusing on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among U.S. soldiers as well as soldier suicides from the Civil War up through the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Actor James Gandolfini is the film's executive producer and conducts on-camera interviews. Watch a preview here.

Six out of nine City Council members signed a motion to use money from the city’s parking lease
to conduct a disparity study that would gauge whether minority- and
women-owned businesses should be favorably targeted by the city’s
contracting policies. Democrats Roxanne Qualls, Yvette Simpson, Wendell
Young, Chris Seelbach, Pam Thomas and P.G. Sittenfeld signed the motion.
The study, which could cost between $500,000 and $1 million, is
required to change city contracting policies after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that governments must
prove there is a racial or gender-based disparity before changing rules to favor any specific race or gender. CityBeat first covered a disparity study in further detail here. Council members will hold a press conference about the issue at noon today.

Petitioners pushing to reform Cincinnati’s public retirement system with a controversial city charter amendment turned in almost 16,000 signatures to City Hall yesterday.
Of those signatures, 7,443 have to be validated by the Hamilton County
Board of Elections. The plan would put future city workers in individual
retirement accounts similar to 401K plans used in the private sector.
But city officials argue that, unlike private workers, public employees
don’t get Social Security benefits on top of their pensions, which means
public workers could get considerably less retirement money under
the amendment than someone would in the private sector. Supporters of the amendment point to the city’s struggles with properly funding its pension system, which led to a bond rating downgrade from credit rating agency Moody’s. Opponents of the
amendment plan to hold a press conference in front of City Hall at 3
p.m. today or after today’s Council meeting, whichever is later.

A majority of City Council on Tuesday sided with the Windholtz family,
who will now be able to sell and demolish the old Lenhardt’s
restaurant building — also known as the Goetz House — in Clifton
Heights. Only Councilwoman Yvette Simpson sided with community members
who argued that the building should be declared a historical landmark
and preserved. “If I were counting votes, I would go with the community.
There are a whole bunch of you and a very few people named Windholtz,”
Councilman Wendell Young said. “I believe that the courage to do what’s
right this time is to side with the family.”

Gov. John Kasich says there’s no need to change oversight over JobsOhio, the privatized development agency that has been mired in controversy in the past few weeks. Most recently, a story in the Dayton Daily News
found six of nine members on the JobsOhio board had direct financial
ties to companies receiving state aid. Republicans argue JobsOhio’s
privatized nature allows it to move quickly with deals that bring in
businesses and jobs to the state, but Democrats say the secretive agency
is too difficult to hold accountable and could be wasting taxpayer
dollars.

Former Gov. Ted Strickland is calling on Ohioans
to act now and reduce the effects of global warming. Strickland is
apparently siding with the near-unanimous scientific consent that global
warming is real and man-made. Scientists generally want to reduce
carbon and other greenhouse-gas emissions enough so global warming
doesn’t exceed two degrees Celsius,
but the planet is currently on a path to warm by five degrees Celsius.
If that trend continues, there could be devastating effects, including
more drought and other extraordinary weather events.

The house of Ariel Castro, the Cleveland man who held captive and raped three women for more than a decade, was demolished
today. The neighborhood is still celebrating the capture of Castro, who
was sentenced to life plus 1,000 years last week, but many in the area
are wondering how the man got away with his crimes for so long.